Re: status of Ada STL?

[Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>]

Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net> writes:

> A few months ago lots of people here felt the need to get annoyed by
> another attempt at a safe C called Cyclone,

I missed that argument -- I wasn't paying attention c.l.a a few months
ago.

>... but I think that Cyclone is
> worthy of study, since it has some features contemplated for the next
> generation of Ada (region based memory management, at least if I
> understood Tucker Taft correctly) and also some features that would be
> great to see in a new language derived from Ada (pattern matching).

I was not impressed by Cyclone's region-based memory management.  At
least for the kinds of programs I write, it seemed that most of the data
would have to end up in the most-global (garbage collected) heap anyway.
Regions are not first-class citizens in Cyclone (they can't be allocated
dynamically, as in "new Region...").  But that restriction is key to
Cyclone's ability to prove stuff about them (no dangling pointers).

Tucker hates garbage collection, and longs for an efficient and safe
alternative to both by-hand memory management and GC.  Me too, but
Cyclone ain't it, IMHO.  As you say, it's worthy of study; Tucker has
mentioned some ideas for making it more powerful.

> http://www.research.att.com/projects/cyclone/
> 
> yes, it would have been nicer if they'd started with Ada as a base, but
> they're going for widespread applicability so C compatibility is an
> important goal.

C compatibility isn't the only thing.  There's also the fact that lots
of people are used to C-like syntax.  Java isn't even close to
compatible with C, but C programmers can feel comfortable with it,
because it sort of looks like C -- I have no proof, but I suspect that's
a big part of the reason Java caught on.

- Bob